Last week, all throughout Korea, families observed the ancient traditions of the Lunar New Year, including certain games, gifts, clothes, sports, greetings, and well-wishes. But the heart of Seollal is the offering by the living of ‘charye’ for their ancestors: a formal ceremony of bows, offerings of food and drink, prayers, and incense. This traditional New Year reverencing of ancestors is observed throughout East Asia under various names.

This reaffirmation of ties with ancestors, like other festivals of the dead throughout the world (e.g. Mexico’s Dia De Los Muertos, “Day of the Dead”) serves a mirror purpose: when we give our respects to the dead and refresh our memories of them via ritual, we are also serving the living—we are, in fact, both asserting and assuring: We, the living, will also be remembered. We, the living, will not fade. This, I suspect, is the secret fear that lurks within me in the guise of homesickness.

We in the West suffer from what I call ‘generational fugue.’ We know the lives of our parents and much of our grandparents’ lives, but what of our great grandparents? We probably know their country of origin, possibly their occupation, and not much more. Our great, great grandparents are less than ghosts to us, for we neither know them nor see them. In contrast, typical East Asians know a centuries-long swathe of their genealogy, giving them an awareness of history that fills their present lives with a sense of continuity.

But if the West needs a Seollal, then why did we not develop one? In fact, we did. People may consider the Western New Year’s Eve holiday as the closest counterpart to the Lunar New Year, but though New Year’s does indeed share some traditions with Seollal (such as resolutions for good behavior throughout the new year) there is a Western holiday that echoes Seollal much more directly: Halloween. Specifically, Halloween’s ancient ancestor, Samhain.

Many Westerners vaguely know of the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain as the spooky pagan predecessor of Halloween, a night (and a day) when the Otherworld yawned open, allowing the dead to wander the land. What most people do not know is that Samhain was also the Celtic New Year (though some researchers dispute this, citing May’s Beltane festival). As with Seollal, Samhain’s most important aspect was the veneration of ancestors by the living. The Celts put candles in their windows to greet their dead ancestors’ roaming spirits and welcomed them with a ritual meal set by the fireside, ensuring themselves of good fortune for the new year and avoiding the bad luck sure to afflict descendants who did not revere their departed kin.

With the spread of Christianity, however, Samhain was replaced by All Saints Day, which eventually became the childish holiday of Halloween. Lost in this evolution was the West’s reverence for our ancestors. Christianity co-opted our duty to revere our departed by promising us that they had everything they needed in heaven; and the festival of the dead’s secondary function as a reassurance for the living that we would be remembered in the future was also taken over by Christianity, again by promising us that we too would live forever in heaven. Eroded by both ends, our ritual remembrance of our departed ancestors faded away. And then, Christianity too began to give up the ghost. Fading.

Barring a massive return to fundamentalist pagan or Christian practices, it seems to me that the West needs to develop a new festival of the dead in order to meet our need for a sense of perpetuity. The old date of Samhain, October 31 to November 1, would be appropriate (and would supplement ‘trick or treating’ rather than supplant it). This new Day of the Dead would serve as an opportunity to remember our ancestors and their accomplishments and reaffirm ties between the living generations, giving us the sense of eternity so desperately needed by modern man.

This Western Seollal would help cure not only the homesickness that I feel on the deserted streets of Seoul, but also the spiritual homesickness that many people feel on the crowded streets of the cities of the West.